


Second Chances

by buttonless



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-21 16:33:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1556921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttonless/pseuds/buttonless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nearly a decade after her assumed death, Sam discovers that Jess is alive and the two begin to rebuild their relationship together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a continuing series about Sam and Jess and their relationship, both in the 'present' and while they were at Stanford together. It's probably going to be mostly one-shots, but they will be related. Pretty much, I just want to write about Sam and Jess being happy together. Because I am a sap.

It’s small and warm, and smells divine. Or at least, what divine might smell like to someone who hadn’t been subjected to the wrath of Heaven. The walls are painted a pale but cheery yellow, and they are covered with frames of drawings and photographs. Little cards next to each frame indicate the artist and which of the local high schools the student is from. The radio is piping a pop song through the shop, an upbeat melody that Sam recognizes from when Castiel would experiment with the different radio channels while driving. _All the broken hearts in the world still beat, let’s not make it harder than it has to be…_

“Be with you in just a minute,” someone calls from behind the large row of ovens, and he inhales so sharply at the tangible familiarity of her voice that it leaves his mouth dry and arid. “Don’t want these to burn!”

He doesn’t reply, he can’t. He tries to remember how to swallow, but that seems to be gone, too. She’s humming along to the radio as she backs through the swinging door that connects the two halves of the store, bumping it open with her hip. Blonde waves are piled loosely on the top of her head in a mess of a bun, contained only by the hair net, and a pair of glasses with thin black frames is tucked up to rest against it.

“All right, what can I help you w-” Her mouth drops slightly when she turns to face him, and her eyes widen.

“Sam?” She asks it, unbelieving, as the tray of cookies is lowered onto the counter in a near trance. Her eyes don’t leave his face, hopeful and fearful and conflicted. He takes a step towards the counter, his long stride bringing him within arms reach of her, and she moves suddenly. Her left hand darts out and grabs a small shaker, and the next moment she’s twisted the cap off and has hurled the contents at his face.

“Christo,” she says loudly. He just smiles at her weakly, wiping the salt off his nose and mouth.

“It’s me, Jess,” he tells her quietly. “It’s just me.”

And the grin that overtakes her face- It takes his breath away. The top of her cheeks rise to brush against her eyelashes; it shows off all her teeth, even the slightly crooked molars in the back, and the breathy sound of shocked laughter issues forth. He forgot how much warmth one smile could contain, how much joy he found in just seeing her smile like this, so freely and widely. She raises both hands and clasps them over her mouth as her silent, sobbing laugh shakes her body, and he has the sudden urge to ask her move them, to plead with her to let him see that smile again. He’s been dreaming of it for years, he realizes, so much so that his faint memories of her grinning face had been one of the few sources of light in his darkness, and now that he’s seeing it in person, seeing the real thing and not the dimmed recollection- It’s like staring directly into the sun, and he thinks he might go blind from it, but he never, never wants to look away.

The thought has hardly even formed before it seems she’s read his mind, because her hands fall away from her face as she speaks, and it’s probably the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard, because it’s coming from Jessica Moore’s mouth and- impossibly- she’s alive and – impossibly- she’s genuinely happy to see the man who she ought to blame for so much and the sheer, impossible joy in her voice is radiant and infectious, and envelops every long-neglected corner of his soul.

“Sam!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes descriptions and mentions of physical and mental torture, and possession.

Sam wakes up sprawled across a futon he doesn’t recognize, the sun in his eyes and a dog leaning on his chest, licking happily across the side of his face that isn’t smashed into the pillow.

“Ger’off me,” he mumbles into caramel fur, pushing the canine away. She whines unhappily as she topples off the futon and onto the floor, but resumes licking at his face in a moment. “Okay, okay,” he tells her. “I’m awake.”

He sits up, checking his watch as he scratches absently behind the dog’s ears.  It’s nearly two o’clock, he realizes with a start.  He never sleeps this late, even if he did stay up all night talking with Jess-

 

_Jess is alive._

 

She’d sent him upstairs, to her apartment above the bakery, when they realized it was nearly morning and she needed to start the ovens for the coming day.  She’d given him a key, told him how to unfold the futon, and warned him not to wake Ophelia unless he wanted to spend the next hour giving the dog attention.

 “So you must be Ophelia,” he tells the dog at his side. She pants happily, her ears perking up at the name. She trots next to him as he crosses the small apartment to the kitchen table, where a note with “SAM” written across the top is propped up.

  _Help yourself to anything in the fridge- I’ll be downstairs in my office for most of the morning, I’ve got some admin stuff I need to do. You are welcome to come hang out in the shop, but it might be busy and my girls will probably give you all sorts of grief, so I totally understand if you stay up here!  I’ll be done by two I reckon, and ~~Mai can~~_ _the girls can run the shop, so our afternoon is open. If Oafie is pestering you, just push her away or tell her “kennel” to make her go sit down.  Hope you slept well- J_

The fridge is actually pretty sparse, but Sam finds a bagel and pops it into a toaster that he’s pretty sure is a fire hazard. He isn’t sure where to find dishes, so he opens a few cupboards and strikes gold on the second try. Jess had set up their kitchen in Palo Alto, being the only one of them who thought that kitchen things had a specific ‘place’ where they were ‘supposed’ to go, and the layout of her kitchen here was pretty similar.

He fills a glass with water from her sink and takes a long drink, pausing as he swallows.

It’s faint, probably unnoticeable to anyone but him- Among humans, that is.  The unmistakable taste of holy water.

A taste like the passing smell of citrus and something unknown, something floral yet ashen.  It doesn’t burn or sting the way it did when he was- When he was… not as clean.  But even after the tainted blood had passed through his veins, even after he was resurrected, he can still identify it.  Like the way some people can tell the difference between different brands of bottled water.

_She must have blessed the whole building’s water tank,_ he thinks to himself as he drinks the glass of tap water.  Depending on how big the tank is and its source, she likely has to renew the blessing fairly often.  He wonders what other protections she has in the apartment.

There’s a fairly large throw rug centered in front of the door, so he crosses to it and nudges the corner over to see the floor beneath. The wooden floor hidden by the rug is bare of any symbols.

The rug itself, though- On the underside, there’s a small black Devil’s Trap, two and a half feet in diameter. He’s not sure if it’s effective, if the fact that it’s ‘facing down’ invalidates the warding. He hopes she’s never had the occasion to test it. 

Sam scoots the rug back into place with his foot, and notices the tubing several feet above the top of the door. It looks like a flat, white rope, no wider than a nickel, and hangs almost exactly where the white brick of the wall ends before stretching into the arch of the ceiling. 

He pushes himself up onto his toes to reach it, squeezing the thick string between his outstretched fingers. It gives a bit, and feels tiny granules beneath the surface of the cotton tubing.  _It’s salt,_ he realizes with a start.  

It’s a salt line, except it can’t be blown away. It’s sewn into place, stretching the entire perimeter of the apartment.  He walks away from the door and back towards the futon, his eyes on the tubing. Roughly ever five feet or so, there’s a seam where pieces of it were stitched together. 

It disappears behind the plaster walls of the bathroom, but when he pokes his head through the door he sees it actually goes _through_ the wall, like demon-proof electrical wiring.  It re-emerges on the other side of the bathroom, into the section of the apartment Jess has cordoned off with decorative metal dividers to make into a bedroom. He can’t imagine how long it must have taken to make.  He’s trying to estimate its length when he smells faint burning, and goes to rescue his bagel.

It’s a little crispy, but he slathers peanut butter on it anyways, and sits down at the kitchen table, glancing around the apartment more.  There isn’t a whole lot of wall space, what with the large floor-to-ceiling windows that cover two of the exterior walls, but Sam notes that anywhere there’s more than a foot or so of blank space, there’s a frame or decorative hanging in place. He’s willing to bet there’s a sigil behind each one.

“She’s very creative,” he tells Ophelia, making the mistake of eye contact while he’s eating.  She looks up at him with large pleading eyes, and he tears off a particularly burnt bit of bagel and tosses it at her in defeat. She snaps it out of the air happily, jumping slightly. 

“You are a very big dog,” he comments. She comes up to his waist when they are both standing, which is saying something.  She’s more the size of a deer than a dog, he thinks as he rifles through his duffle, pulling out a clean shirt while Ophelia sticks her nose in the bag. He swats at her muzzle. There’s weapons in there, after all.

After he’s used the bathroom, there’s really no more delaying it.  He needs to go downstairs- Well, the note from Jess says she understands if he’d rather not. But there’s no delaying the inevitable. 

Maybe yesterday was a dream, and he’s going to open that door only to realize he’s imagined this all.

Or it’s going to be real. And Jess is going to be downstairs, in the bakery.  And they’ll have to continue the conversation they were having last night.

Sam knows, of course, the option he prefers. But if he's honest? He dreads either one.

 

_______________

 

They are silent for a few minutes, as Sam runs her through every test he knows- A long, painful process.  He expected a reaction from the silver knife. Nothing happens, except Jess tells him, “Now you.”  

It’s that way for every test. He braces himself for the worst, to realize the woman standing in front of him is a fake, or a trap. The inside of his jacket burns against his chest, holding the knife he knows he will slice across her throat if that is the case.  

He knowsit _has_ to be her, because that smile was the kind only she could pull off- But years of experience make him wary, and the initial joy at seeing her alive is being buried behind the bubbling anxiety that something _has_ to be wrong. Because something is _always_ wrong.

“That’s all the tests I know,” he finally says. “And you passed.”

There’s an awkward moment that stretches between them, neither sure what to do next.

“If there’s any others you’d like to run on me, that’s fine-”

“No,” she replies.  “Those were all the ones I know, and then some.  So you are gonna need to tell me what some of those were for,” she instructs mildly.  “But first we probably have a lot to catch up on.”

“Yeah-”

“Not yet,” she interrupts, and she seems a little surprised by the force of her voice.  “I need to close up for the night first.”

 “Oh,” Sam replies.  “Yeah. Sure.”

“You can sit down,” she tells him, nodding to one of the small tables near the window.  He does, because he’s honestly not sure what else to do.

She pulls the blinds down, and locks the front door. She disappears behind the row of ovens, turning lights and appliances off as she goes.  She keeps glancing back at him, sitting uncomfortably on a chair meant for shorter people, as though she can’t believe he’s really there. He’s having trouble believing it himself.

She returns with a clipboard, and hangs it on the wall behind the cash register.  “The inventory for the night,” she tells him, flicking off the lights in the display coolers.

She crosses back to the table he’s sitting next to and takes the opposite chair.

“I don’t- I have so many questions, Sam. It seems impossible to know where to start.”

Her voice is soft, a mixture of awe and fear that he can relate to fairly well.

“Yeah.”

It’s like it’s the only thing he knows how to say, that one syllable noise of hesitant agreement.  Nearly three minutes pass, interrupted only when Jess tries to ask a question.  There’s a “When did-” and a “Why-” and a few other attempts that she gives up on, unsatisfied.

They haven’t made eye contact again, Sam memorizing the grain of the table and Jess staring at the space just behind his elbow.

“I ran into your brother at a farmer’s market in northern California,” he finally says.  “It was a surreal conversation, because he seemed to be under the impression that we ‘broke up because of the distance’ after your decision to ‘study abroad in Peru.’  And then it got weirder when Ben mentioned that you owned a bakery in Minneapolis and- And I just had to find out for certain-" 

Her voice is raw and her face nearly crumples when she interrupts, leveling the question at him like an accusation.

“Sam Winchester, how in the _fuck_ are you alive?”

He startles at the quiet anger in her voice, so different from the warmth that had greeted him only a few minutes ago.

“How am I- Jess, I _saw_ you die.  You- You were bleeding out on the ceiling while our apartment _burned to the ground._ ‘How are you alive?’ is supposed to be _my_ question-” 

“Well, _you,_ ” Jess replies, pointing a finger at his chest, “Jumped to the bottom of Hell with the Devil riding shotgun.  That wasn’t supposed to be a round-trip, Sam.” 

“How- How do you know that?” 

Sam has an awful, sneaking suspicion that he already knows the answer.

“I read those atrocious Edlund books,” she says, his hunch confirmed as his heart crashes down into his stomach like a stone, “Which were shoddy literature and had some very distorted perspective issues that I objected to,” she continues, “But I had assumed the lore and the narrative were at least accurate. Was I wrong?”

“No,” Sam says.  “The books… They were pretty accurate.” 

He actually hasn’t read them, but he knows what’s in them- All the awful things he did to Dean, his relationship with Ruby, his inability to be anything other than a freak and a failure and an abomination. And Jess has read them. Jess knows everything.

“So, then how are you alive?”

“Okay,” Sam tells her.  “I’m going to give you the bare bones essential on how I got back from that if it’ll reassure you, but then it is your turn- Since you are obviously more caught up on my life then I am on yours.”

Her faces softens ever so slightly, and she agrees. “All right.”

“Cas- Castiel the angel- raised me from the Cage.”

“That shouldn’t have been possible-”

“It wasn’t.  He brought back my body, my mind, my memories, the other basic structures of what makes me ‘me’- That stuff was never locked in the Cage, not really. Just tied to the metaphorical bars.”

“But?”

“But my soul was.  Locked in the Cage.  And Cas couldn’t retrieve it.  So I was ‘me’, but I, uh, wasn’t exactly human.”

“You’re soulless?”

Her voice is tinged with shock and horror, and something that might be pity.  He is surprised at how well Jess hides her disgust. 

“Was.  For more than a year or so.  Eventually,” he tells her, deciding to skip over the fights with Dean and his wavering on whether he ever wanted the thing back in the first place and everything awful he had done without it, “Death got my soul back from the Cage. He’s like, the trump card of the Universe, so he just waltzed in and took it back to my body.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Not at first,” he replies after a moment. “Death put up this ‘Wall’ in my mind, to block out the memories of Hell.  But then it fell,” he continues, leaving out how _that_ happened, because even if he’s forgiven Cas for it, he doesn’t like to think about it.  “And it was rough for awhile.  Flashbacks, hallucinations, passing out a lot-”

Jess winces visibly.

“-Had a few ‘pyschotic breaks,’ I guess you would call them, and I got worse and worse at hiding them.  Ended up in a hospital for a bit, and then Cas- He cured me. Sorta.  I still remember Hell and what I did while I was soulless and everything else, but Cas took away the way I had been _reacting_ to it. But then Cas had all of the things I had been experiencing, at least until he and Dean went to Purgatory- That’s actually several other different stories, never mind.  But, yeah. That’s basically how I’m still alive after the Cage.”

Jess doesn’t respond for a long time. Her lips are turned under her teeth, pressed together as in pain, and her face is turned away from him, her eyes squeezed shut.  She’s probably repulsed. She should be.

She meets his eyes, finally, and stares at him with an expression he can’t read before she says, “I’m so sorry, Sam.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, brushing it off with a hollow chuckle.

She raises her eyebrows at him.

“I’m sorry that it _happened._ I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

Sam ignores the prickling sensation at the corner of his eyes.

“But you’re- You’re okay now?”

He glances away, pressing down on the heel of his hand in reflex.  “I’m fine,” he replies automatically.

She stares at him, her eyes narrowed ever so slightly, until he feels forced to meet her eyes again.  She doesn’t believe him. At all. But she doesn’t pursue it.

“If you say so,” she replies quietly.

“Thank you,” he breathes, a hushed whisper that he barely hears himself.

They sit in silence, listening to the muted noises of the empty street for several minutes until Jess sighs deeply.

“My turn,” she tells him, and Sam gives her what he hopes comes across as an encouraging and understanding nod to continue.

“A couple hours after you and Dean left,” Jess says, starting her story with that awful night when he had left Stanford, “I walked into the kitchen, and it was filled with thick black smoke. It was everywhere.  I was so confused, because I hadn’t been cooking or baking, and I rushed towards the oven- And then… And then it possessed me.”

Jess swallows audibly, her eyes staring past Sam’s shoulder.

“I blacked out, I think.  Or it force me under. Because the next thing I remember- I was looking down at you on the bed.  Eating a cookie. And I tried to scream, but my mouth wouldn’t open and then I realized that blood was dripping down on you. And that it was my blood.  I couldn’t even feel the wound.  It wasn’t _me_ anymore, when the fire started, but I was… you know, ‘there,’” she tells him softly. 

And he only nods. Because he does know.

“But they made me watch.  And later- They’d play the scene like a dvd menu screen in my head, Sam. Over and over and over, until I could _feel_ your screams and the heat and-”

She gulps down the beginning of a sob, pressing her hand against her mouth.

“Sorry,” she says with a shaky swallow. “Never really talked about this before.”

“Not your fault,” he repeats quietly.

“I could feel the fire, but it didn’t kill me. I wanted to die so badly, Sam- But almost immediately after your brother rescued you, it stopped. Or, I stopped being there, anyway.”

“The demon teleported?”

Jess nods.  “I didn’t know that’s what it was, at the time.  But it told me pretty quickly.  It and the others.”

She describes her prison- An airplane hanger, with about half a dozen demons.

“They took turns, possessing me. Told me awful things- About you. About the world.  About what was going to happen to us all.”

“Did you ever find out who they were?”

“They belonged to Azazel.  Or to his ‘generals,’ at least. They told me I was just a contingency plan.  In case they ever needed- In case they ever needed something to use against you.”

Sam has suspected this, of course. That if demons had kept Jess imprisoned, it was because of him. So that they could control him, barter her life for his loyalty. This is all his fault. She had been a tool to hurt him with. He’d made her into a tool when he’d let himself love her.

“Those first weeks- They were rough. They kept forcing me down- I’d wake up with no idea of the time or the day, and no idea of what my body had been doing while they’d had control.  Sometimes I had new cuts or bruises- But that was rare.  Most of the torture happened when I was ‘awake’.”

Sam closes his eyes, but Jess doesn’t notice.

“The physical torture was fairly- Tame, I guess. They had pretty strict orders to keep me alive and in one piece, after all. They’d even stitched up the gash on my stomach as soon as I’d arrived.  Stuck to my limbs and face pretty exclusively until it had healed.”

Her casual tone of voice does nothing to quell the bile in Sam’s throat.

“And the mental torture?”

Jess doesn’t reply for a minute. “I got used to it. And it wasn’t half as bad as some of the later stuff after Azazel, so…”

He isn’t sure what she means by that. He doesn’t ask.

“About a month in, I convinced them to let me call my mom,” she says. 

“She hadn’t heard from me in awhile and I was expected to home for break, after all.  She didn’t know I was ‘dead,’ since apparently the majority of the ‘fire’ was an illusion anyways.  Our ‘deaths’ were mourned by our friends on campus only and-”

“I never visited your grave, Jess,” Sam interrupts. “I was too ashamed.  It never even occurred to me to call your mom or read the newspaper or- Jess, I should have figured it out.  If I had just- Just done some basic follow-up, I would have figured out the whole thing was a sham, I could have rescued you-”

“Not your fault, Sam,” Jess tells him gently. “And I’m sure they were prepared for those possibilities.  They would have fooled you somehow.” 

Maybe she’s right.  But there’s no way to know.  There’s no way to measure the depth of how much he’s failed her.

She continues.  She tells him about calling her mom, hearing her own voice say not only was she not coming home for break, but that she was leaving for Peru to study abroad for a semester. 

“At the time, calling Mom was a blessing,” she says. “Just hearing her voice… It was such a relief.  And I thought it was best that she didn’t worry.  I knew enough at that point to know I didn’t want her or Ben or anyone to come looking for me. But then- Once I was ‘in Peru,’ I could be held indefinitely,” she says with a bitter laugh.

“I don’t think there was much of a plan, really- The way they talked about you, I think they were scared. Of you,” Jess clarifies.

“That you might be more powerful than they could have imagined, and maybe not the most obedient.  So they just figured I could be useful if you went off the rails. But I guess eventually, it became clear that you weren’t that eager to develop your ‘abilities’, and were just going after demons and monsters like any other revenge-driven hunter. So, Azazel came.”

Azazal, unsurprisingly, had wanted to know about Sam. “You were this unknown entity that wasn’t turning out anything like expected.  He wanted to know everything about you, Sam.”

Her eyelids sink together and she inhales deeply, one hand tightening into a fist where it rests on the table.

“Sam- I- God, I’m so sorry- I told him whatever he wanted, Sam.”

 “Hey- Hey, it’s fine-”

“No, it’s not ‘fine,’ Sam,” Jess spits back at him, tears spinning down her face everytime she blinks.  “I didn’t even _consider_ refusing, I just answered _every_ question, just because I wanted to make the pain go away, I told him _everything_ I knew about you-”

“Jess-”  Sam reaches across the table, and tentatively rests his palm across her closed fist, squeezing reassuringly. Her eyes flutter rapidly as she looks towards the ceiling, forcing the tears back down.

“I told myself- I told myself that it didn’t matter. That it didn’t matter if they knew what your favorite classes were, or what you ate for breakfast or where you had worked on campus or what we did on our first date-”

“And it didn’t-”

“-But I still helped them _understand_ you, Sam.  You were just a myth to them in a story they were trying to set in motion, and I made you _real._ And- And I don’t even know how to measure the consequences of that.  I don’t know what difference it might have made, if I had chosen differently.”

“Probably not that much,” Sam tries to reassure her, but Jess just chuckles.

“Hey,” she says with another small laugh and a wry smile that’s still damp with her tears, “I’ve spent years not forgiving myself for this.  Don’t try to tell me it was just small potatoes.”

It’s a poor joke, but it’s a joke nonetheless, so Sam returns the smile.  “All right, then,” he indulges her.  “The fact that I like bran cereal was crucial to the Apocalypse.  The lynchpin for the demons’ schemes.”

Jess snorts wetly through her nose in amusement, but doesn’t say anything.  Nor does she make any move to pull her hand out from under Sam’s. 

“You did the right thing, Jess,” he says after a beat. “They were- They wanted to know about me, and you wanted to not get hurt.  And honestly, you didn’t know that much about me that they were really interested in, anyways.”  He hesitates.

“You don’t need my forgiveness,” he tells her, because it’s true. He’s the one who endangered her, who abandoned her to this fate. “But you have it.”

“Thanks, Sam,” she says, the corners of her mouth barely lifting.  “Things did get a lot better after that.  Azazel liked me, liked how cooperative I was.  Said I described you very well, and that unless I became disobedient, I wasn’t to be harmed as much.”

She describes the next half a year or so, how the demons had moved her across the country, passed her off to lower and lower ranking kin as her importance waned.  She was still possessed frequently, but for control instead of torture. She spent most of her time locked in various rooms, trying to get information from her guards on the rare occasions that they remembered that she required food.

Some of the things she mention match to his own memories of the time.  She had been told of Dean’s brush with death, and the deal John had made. Ava’s disappearance coincided with a visit from Azazel, frustrated that Sam was unmotivated. In the hours between Sam’s death and Dean’s deal, Jess had nearly been shot in the head, determined no longer to be useful. 

Maybe for the first time in his life, Sam thinks that Dean’s deal had been the absolute best choice.

“And then word came that Azazel was dead,” she tells him, “And it was chaos.”

“And that’s when you escaped?”

“If only,” Jess says forlornly, taking a sip from the glass of water he’d gotten her sometime in the last few hours. She’s been holding herself together well, speaking calmly and as detached from the story as possible. But in her tone and her face- He can see that falling apart.

He remembers that when he’d spoken to her brother in that market, Ben had said she’d been in Peru doing charity work for over three years. Not one.

He remembers what she had said about ‘later’. About what had happened after Azazel.

“That’s –That’s when Lillith came for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What happened to Jess between her 'death' and Sam finding her again is discussed in this chapter, but only the first part. More of her story and the rest of the 'first conversation' they have here about her disappearance will be shared in later chapters.
> 
> Sorry that I am awful at updating, and thanks for reading!


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